A quiet notice V2Melody closes at midnight on , Spanish time.

Closes

A note from Richard

V2Melody will close at midnight on 20 January 2028

This site has been a retirement project in musical poetry: poems chosen with care and set to music, offered freely for as long as it felt right to keep the garden open.

The work no longer holds the place it once did in my life. I have gone as far with it as I wish to go. Like a sand mandala, it was made to be completed and then released. I am not attached to its permanence, and I do not believe any of it needs to last beyond the time it was given. The poems were already here before I arrived and began to experiment with them. They will still be here when these musical experiments, and indeed myself, have been swept away, like the sand of a mandala. Nothing has been lost.

I want a simpler end to my life, days of simple love and enjoyment with my wonderful wife of 20 years. The work of maintaining a server, the monitoring, and the residual obligations that come with keeping a site alive no longer fit that life.

From 4 November 2026 I will not be adding new poems or musical poems to the site.

The experimental music I am making now is on my Suno profile. Those pieces stay there, and are not added to this site.

Until midnight on 20 January 2028, Spanish time, everything remains available exactly as it is. That is when my VPS server contract comes to an end, and it will not be renewed. After that, the server will be switched off and the site will disappear.

The Mandala Is Finished explains this more fully.

Thank you to anyone who found a poem, a track, or a quiet moment here.

The pleasure was in the making.

Richard

Home › Glossary › Letter C

chimeric figure

Device
Pronunciation

Understanding ARPABET Pronunciation

Want to hear it? Click the Listen button to hear the browser speak the word using text-to-speech!

The pronunciation guide uses the ARPABET phonetic system—the same system used in speech recognition and text-to-speech applications.

Vowel Examples:
AE1 = cat, bat
EH1 = bed, head
IY1 = see, me
OW1 = go, boat
UW1 = boot, do
Stress Numbers:
0 = no stress (unstressed)
1 = primary stress (loud)
2 = secondary stress (medium)
Example:
AH0 TH IY1 N AH0
= a-THEE-na (Athena)

The stressed syllable (marked with 1) is pronounced louder and clearer than others.

Quick Definition

A figure of speech that combines incompatible or fantastical traits, blending animal, human, or mythical features; in poetry, it creates surreal imagery, defies logic, and expands imaginative possibility.

Detailed Definition
A chimeric figure is a poetic persona or image that combines incongruous elements—human/animal, past/future, sacred/profane—into a composite symbol of transformation or paradox; drawing on mythological chimera, this figure embodies cultural hybridity or psychological complexity, as in Plath’s beekeeper merging apiarist and martyr into a single fraught identity.
Example
Example in poetry:
Chimeric figure combines mythical creatures in metaphor: “Her voice was sphinx and siren” (hypothetical); in Anne Carson’s “Autobiography of Red,” Geryon is a chimeric figure; contemporary eco-poetry uses chimeric figure for climate monsters (“plastic kraken”); the device appears in surrealist and feminist verse; chimeric figure symbolizes complexity and transformation
Additional Notes
An image, character, or metaphor in a poem that combines two or more radically different, often contradictory, parts; Used to represent internal conflict, impossible ideals, or fantastic hybridity; Related to surrealism and chimeric design.
Also Known As
hybrid figure composite image mythical blend metaphorical chimera Chimeric metaphor
Skip to main content